Three West Seattle Crime Watch reader reports tonight – mail theft, vandalism, and suspicious early-morning behavior around neighborhood cars – read on:
First: Received from Sarah tonight:
We live at Walnut and Lander in North Admiral off Hiawatha park.
Our outgoing mail was stolen out of mailbox around 4 pm today. At that time about six young white youth rang our doorbell to ask for money for the YMCA. I said no thanks and noticed my outgoing letter was missing and that no new mail had been left by our postman. I assumed that we had not received any mail today which is uncommon. I followed the youth to the sidewalk and noticed they did not stop at my neighbors’ home and turned the corner at Forest.
When our mailman did come by I realized my outgoing letter was stolen. I followed the path the fundraising youth had taken down to Forest and found my envelope open crumbled, my check ripped into pieces but the four page application was missing. There is nothing of importance there.
My neighbor North of me reported the youth did stop at his home too.
As mail theft is a federal crime, I have reported this to the police.
Separate from whether the solicitors had anything to do with the missing mail, since this doubles as a door-to-door alert of sorts, we’re checking with the Y to see if they actually have sanctioned door-to-door donation-seeking going on right now.
This morning, Becky e-mailed a report of what looked like car casing, at the very least:
Good Morning, at approximately 3:45 am this morning I heard a car drive by which isn’t unusual. The car was driving west on Lincoln Park Way SW and took a left onto Murray Av SW. I got up to look as I typically do and saw a big burgundy (dark red) 4 door drive by. There were two people in the car but I could only see the passenger, an older white male.
The car drove slowly by my place and continued north on Murray only to come back a few minutes later – backward. The car parked at the neighboring complex and the driver got out in dark clothing and didn’t close the door completely making that solid sound of closing all the way. He went to the trunk and didn’t allow the lid to go all the way up, I could hear his head hit the lid a couple of times. He went back to the driver’s door and got a dark, unmarked ball cap out and put in on, I already had seen his short, light colored hair.
The man got out two dark bags, one black and the other dark green, from the trunk and placed them on the ground and put the lid down until the light went out, he didn’t close it to secure it. He began walking with the two bags and I thought he was going to take the walk way up to the neighboring building, he did not. He continued up the street in front of me, I’m a bit off the ground and I couldn’t believe he didn’t see me.
The man walked right up to one of my neighbor’s cars and went to the hood and set the bags down. At this point I shouted out that I was calling the police which I was already dialing. I had already gotten the plate number as he parked (just in case). … This occurred around 3:45 to 3:58 am, when I called 911.
And from Austin, a vandalism report:
Left the house this morning to see that someone had “tagged” our mailbox with permanent marker with (three letters). Saw the same letters all over the new Findlay RapidRide shelter while I was waiting for the bus. Lovely way to start the short week; I thought folks might want to keep an eye out.
Austin included a photo, though we can’t use it because it’s too close-up to make much sense if we blurred it as we usually do with tagging, but we can say that the marker was bright red; the first letter was a capital A, and the second two were written lower-case. P.S. If you spot graffiti/tagging vandalism on a bus shelter or other Metro facility, here’s the hotline for reporting it (according to a page we found on the county website) – 206-263-6369.
| 10 COMMENTS